6 things you should know about User Experience

By Shashank Shwet / 31 Fri, 2015 / 10 min read

User Experience has become an important aspect of creating digital products – let thatbe a website or a platform that you are launching. If you go across job sites, you will seea large number of jobs pertaining to user experience design, visual design, userresearcher and more. The demand of UX designers is not limited to just the IT industry.Even manufacturing, pharmacy, auto, telecom and most other industry segments arelooking for UX designers. What is it about the field of UX design that it has become askill most sought for across all of these different industries?

Read on for the answer

User Experience is about making digital products

UX design is about making digital products. It is about understanding the needs ofthe users, creating a product roadmap based on these user needs and thenimplementing the principles of UX design so that you get easy to use, simpleproduct. Today, most companies are using the principles of UX design to createdifferent digital products. If a bank needs to create a mobile banking or automotivecompany wants software for their dealers, UX comes into play.

Difference between Interaction design and visual design

UX design field is broadly divided in three categories – interaction designer (alsocalled UX designer), Visual designer (also called a UI designer) and a user researcher.An interaction designer is the one who works on the efficiency of the digital productbeing created. Tools like task analysis and customer journey mapping are used tobring efficiency into the digital product. A visual designer works on the aesthetics,fonts, use of words that the user understands. A bookmyshow app which helps youbuy movie tickets in a few simple steps is the work of an Interaction Designer. Whenthe user chooses the ticket to be bought, it shows a bike for two and an autorickshaw for three to increase memorability. This is the job of the visual designer.

User Research is not what marketing agencies do

When a marketing agency does research work on a segment of population, they donot really empathize with the population. On the contrary, a major part of user experience design is to empathize with the user. It is impossible to empathize with asegment of users. For a User Experience a 13 year old introvert user and a 13 year oldextrovert user are quite different (which may be in the same segment). User researchis done by UX designers to understand the unmet needs of the users as to createfeatures that can fulfill those needs

UX is not what you implement once

UX is not a one-time implementation. Today, UX designers define the roadmap ofthe product, help in define the interaction design and visual design and once theproduct is ready go about testing it with the users again. This is an iterative processthat needs to be constantly implemented in the product design and developmentphase.

UX is just not about users

The job of the UX designer is not to think about the users only, but also tounderstand the right technology and the right business requirements. UX designersneed to come up with designs that are feasible to be developed by the technologybeing used. It should also adhere to the guidelines of the platform (Android, iOS,Web etc.). In addition, it should also keep the business goals of the enterprise that iscreating a digital product in mind.

UX is a skill and can be learnt by everybody

UX design is a skill that in our opinion can be and should be learnt by all those whoare in the field of product development, IT or software engineering and product marketing. It is important to implement the aspects of UX design in your productdevelopment strategy.

IMAGINxP has been providing certification and training where a diverse set ofprofessionals from product designers, architects, software engineers and more havebeen coming out and learning these skills to implement in their profession. Know fromus as to when the next batch is starting.